Unless you are exceptional enough to become somewhat well-known in the field, yes. It's not about ability and whether you can learn the material - you just won't even be invited for an interview if they have a whole line of PhDs (and MS's) waiting. The only hope would be to have people try to recruit you, which would mean that you're well-known, maybe through publishing high-profile open source libraries, dominating numerous Kaggle competitions, etc.

It depends on your experience. To be honest I don't think majority of ml engineers out there had a degree in ml engineering.

It is true that without degree for some sort of certificate it will not be easy to get your first job. But I guarantee that after your first job your life as ml engineer will be much easier.

You will need to show expertise about machine learning, big data tools like spark, databases, Linux and shell programming.

You need at least a related degree, such as computer science, at my company. A corsera course and a masters in information science would be helpful. Even then, they will likely take someone with a master's or PhD in AI/ML over an internal transfer. I had this happen to me.

It’s you vs the other guys. If they all have degrees... then yes. It’s tougher without one.

Unless you’re gifted.

I just don’t see how you can avoid it unless you’re an elite learner.

Even just one course in a CS degree on ML or NLP has a ton of advanced concepts.